


All the Kids Cried Out

by lesbianettes



Series: Best Interest [1]
Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Abandonment, Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Altered Mental States, Anger, Anger as a Response to Trauma, Anxiety, Anxiety Disorder, Body Focused Repetitive Behavior, Character Death, Depression, Dissociation, Flashbacks, Gen, M/M, Mental Breakdown, Nightmares, Nile Decides Everyone Needs Therapy, Open Ending, POV Andy | Andromache of Scythia, POV Booker | Sebastien le Livre, POV Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani, POV Nicky | Nicolò di Genova, POV Nile Freeman, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Psychological Trauma, Self Harm as Self-Stimulatory Behavior, Self-Harm, Stimming, Suicide Attempt, Temporary Character Death, Trauma, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Unsafe Stimming
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-13
Updated: 2020-08-14
Packaged: 2021-03-06 07:27:12
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 5,705
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25879648
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lesbianettes/pseuds/lesbianettes
Summary: What happened at Merrick was traumatic. They all deal with it in different ways.
Relationships: Andy | Andromache of Scythia & Nile Freeman & Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani & Nicky | Nicolò di Genova, Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Series: Best Interest [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1878610
Comments: 12
Kudos: 160





	1. I'm Bigger than My Body

**Author's Note:**

> Each chapter will focus on one member of the Old Guard.
> 
> Fic and Chapter titles from "Control" by Halsey.

Booker knows he was wrong. There’s no sugar-coating the fact that he is directly responsible for everything that happened to them at Merrick, or the blood smeared across every floor. Their old hideout in Goussainville, countless cars, the house where Copley lived and every empty space at Merrick, have all been soaked through in a deep, velvety red. He could have killed Andy, he thinks as he watches people travel the Parisian streets. In a decade, he’ll have to leave. For now, though, he can stay somewhere familiar and reminisce over the last time he saw his family.

He will never see Andy again.

There are all these dreams, heavy and hurting, to haunt his nights. Booker always slept easy. In fact, he has a hard time waking up. But now especially, he finds himself wasting away in moments of rest that are anything but rejuvenating. Besides his own nightmares and traumas, he gets the dreams of those separated from him, a consequence of his own actions. Without the dreams, he might be able to pretend that it isn’t as bad as he remembers. But it’s worse. Always worse, in the middle of the night, catching flashes of what the others are doing. There is so much pain he can feel, even through this flimsy connection, and it reminds him of his role in all of it.

Before they banished him, he thought that perhaps it would be okay. They all spoke and although they were angry with him, they remained themselves. Joe washed Nicky’s bloody hair clean in an alley, and Nile carefully stitched up Andy’s unhealed wounds. Of them all, she has the most recent experience with injuries, and the marines have made her very resourceful. She is good for them. With Booker gone, she will be able to help them in a way he never could have, himself. 

It is easier to drink than to feel. His body processes alcohol faster, as do the others’, but he remembers its taste, as well as how much he must drink and at what pace for the ache to dull into something warm and fuzzy. The dreams are much more tolerable that way, too. If he cannot understand them, then they cannot hurt him.

He was blown to pieces, when they took Nicky and Joe. By the time Nile and Andy came back, and Booker began to come back to life, his body was knitting itself back together, but he cannot deny the fact that it may have been his most gruesome death. He’s been hung and shot and beaten, but this was different than that. His body was in pieces on the floor. Half dead, half-alive, he would wake up just long enough to inch across the floor and pull himself back together. It’s his fault for allowing this, he knows that, but it hurt in a different way to prop what was left of him up in that chair and die over and over while he tried to heal.

When Andy slapped him awake, his organs were still spilling out of his ragged, burned pink skin. That was the death that was most physically painful, he decides. There’s something different about being in pieces. If he thinks hard enough, he vaguely remembers Joe losing an arm during one of the wars they fought through together, and Nicky cradling his face as he lay on the ground, healing slow and painful but still staring up at his love.

The two of them have always had each other. He was right when he said that in the first place. There’s no separation or isolation, after more than 900 years of loving each other. No one loves Booker. In those dreams, they never mention him or long for him, any of them. He does not exist anymore.

It is easy to sit in his sad little safehouse apartment and drink to forget, even if he always remembers. That night, in Sudan, when it all started to go downhill, he remembers his body jerking uncontrollably with the force of the bullets hitting him. And it wasn’t just him, either, but the others, falling to the ground beside him with unseeing eyes aimed at the walls. Booker came back just before Andy. He had a moment to see them all in puddles of blood and riddled with holes before they started choking and coughing and healing. They have died together many times. They have risen just as many.

Booker dies of starvation twice in the six months before he meets Quynh in person for the first time. The last time he cooked was before his first death, as a young man in the army heating up rations over boiling water. With his family, they either ate out, or Nicky cooked. Sometimes Joe would help. It was a love language of his, to make something beautiful and provide it for them all. Mostly it was Italian food, but it was so good that he never minded the repetition. Without them, he doesn’t know how to make anything, nor does he have the energy to fight his way through the weight on his shoulders and get something.

Starvation is not as painful a death, he thinks. He heals before it can hurt, until his body turns to sharp edges and fragile bones and he falls asleep. In fact, he’s only certain he died at all because when he wakes up, his body has filled itself out a bit again in its usual bid to keep him alive. He tries harder for a while, after the death, but it comes back again when he cannot keep himself afloat.

It’s been two days since his second starvation when he comes home drunk to see her at ease in his refuge. He thinks he must be hallucinating her at first. The only time he’s seen her before has been in terrible nightmares, but now, her face is clean and her body still. She speaks much softer than she did in her screams.

She doesn’t stay.

As soon as he tells her what happened, what he did, she says he deserves to be alone and leaves him behind. There’s a whiff of flowery perfume, not unlike the way Andy described Quynh to be over midnight talks and post-death hazes. It takes most of Booker’s strength not to clutch the hem of her robes as she leaves, but he holds his dignity as much as one can in a heap on the hardwood floor.

In his dreams, she does not go and see the others. Instead she travels, and he sees her interspersed with Nile’s burned palms, Joe’s tear-soaked lashes, Nicky’s bruised knuckles, Andy’s flushed cheeks. She’s happier than them all, even after what she went through, perhaps because she’s already started to move on. Quynh has acknowledged her trauma, and through that, she heals. Booker is not there, and based on his dreams, the others aren’t either.

He drinks himself to sleep again, craving the day he’s welcomed back into the fold.


	2. I'm Colder than this Home

For the first time in several thousand years, Andy can die. She could be gone in an instant. That’s fucking terrifying, in a way nothing has ever been before. Losing Lykon and Quynh hurt beyond reason, but it wasn’t as scary as the idea of leaving every single piece of herself behind for good. She can’t imagine not waking up and making jokes with her family, or not being there to bring them to safety after every single mission. 

It is slow, healing physically, after they all escape from Merrick. She pulled muscles and was shot, hurt herself on broken glass and choked on gas from the explosion. The others are physically fine by the time they sat down in the cafe to discuss Booker’s exile, while she was still struggling to stay upright and calm. Nicky found her painkillers and put two into her hand, after Nile took the time to stitch and bandage her up, the one most recently mortal and experienced with first aid. The boys are angry. Nile is forgiving. As for Andy, she hasn’t decided or figured out how she feels. It’s impossible to process the betrayal, being mortal, and the existence of a new immortal all at once.

“You alright, boss?” Joe asks her one morning, when her hands shake too badly to hold her glass of orange juice.

“Just fine.”

He doesn’t seem to believe her, but he doesn’t push either. His speech alone is a victory she’s happy to take. Everything that happened hit him in a different way none of them can begin to understand. Before, she would have said Nicky gets it. They were together. Their souls are of the same fabric. But even he seems at a loss between Joe’s fleeting moments of coherency. She accepts his few seconds of care and smiles at him while he understands it, and pretends not to hurt when he wanders off again to hide in the bedroom he and Nicky share. 

It’s different, to be able to experience a lingering pain. Andy’s bullet wound aches and tugs for weeks as the flesh knits itself back together, a process which normally only takes seconds, minutes if she’s unlucky. Late at night while she listens to crying or yelling in the other rooms, she drags her fingertips against the puckered skin on her lower abdomen. Booker could have killed her. Granted, he didn’t know it had gone away, but in an instant, he could have wiped her from this earth. Seven thousand years, gone. 

She presses her fingertips against the pink mark and hisses in pain. It’s going to hurt for a long while yet. Eventually, she’ll be left with a scar, and isn’t that such a strange concept? For seven thousand years, she has had unmarred skin; any scars from before have long since faded and healed, her body unwilling to hold onto such reminders of the past. It’s new. Everything is new all of a sudden.

There are so many things, little things, that she used to take for granted but is now afraid of. Sharpening her labrys used to be an act of devotion to the treasured weapon, but now it’s another way she could get hurt on the rough grain of the wetstone or the edge of her blade. Nicky sharpens it for her when he does his own, and if she watches, she can see the bruises that seem to never fade from his knuckles. Broken bones take a little longer than simple cuts and bruises, and he rarely allows them time to heal before he’s hurting himself all over again. Quite frankly, it’s depressing to see him so constantly hurt. Then again, that’s the life that has been chosen for them. Andy has just run out of time to live it. 

Come dinnertime, no one cooks anymore. Nile doesn’t know how, Joe is incapable, and Nicky refuses to do much else besides attack dummies outside in the harsh sunlight. And Andy, she can’t bear anything that might take her away from her family now that they’ve been through so much. Simple things like scrambling eggs on the stove have become a threat she can’t simply dispatch with the skill she’s spent so long building. There are no options left for her. Not anymore. The mere sight of the knife block sends her spiraling in fear of what could happen. Every night that they do eat, Nile and/or Nicky go out to pick up something pre-made, sometimes still cold. Frozen pizza that’s hard as rock is better than nothing, when she’s still afraid of the oven.

Fortunately, she doesn’t dream. One byproduct of her new mortality is the loss of searching for Booker and Quynh, who she hears still plagues the dreams of the others. Somehow she misses it; she misses seeing them, knowing them, feeling them. Absence in this way is something she’s ill equipped to handle. For the first time in a long time, she’s lonely. That’s not to say the feeling has become strange, but she simply hasn’t experienced this level of isolation since she was the lone immortal walking the Eurasian Steppes and wondering if it was a punishment or a gift. Perhaps it was both. She wouldn’t know any more now than she did when her first death didn’t take. 

Most of her days are spent in crippling anxiety, the likes of which she hasn’t felt since the first 100 years of Quynh’s absence. At any slight threat, more perceived than actual, she finds her chest tight and her cheeks flushed and wet. Maybe this will be the way she dies. In a panic attack driven by the fear of it, she will forget how to draw in her next breath, and just like that, it’ll be over. She’ll be leaving her family behind, sure, but she will just as much be moving on from how badly it all hurts. 

As Nile and Nicky spar in the yard, she watches the ease with which they dance around each other. Nicky breaks her wrist, she his jaw. They take a moment to heal and then get back to it. They’ve both changed since Merrick. Nile was excellent at keeping herself safe. Nicky would have never been so rough in a play fight. But they have changed. As Andy watches, Nile’s guard stays suspiciously down, and Nicky goes in for the kill without hesitation each time. 

Afterward, as they wash away the blood, Andy pictures dying at their hands. It would be easier, she thinks, to end her life by their whim as opposed to an ambush or a stranger’s cold touch. Then her soul might find peace. They would make sure it is quick, it doesn’t hurt. There will be no agonizing exsanguination or guts spilled across the floor. Perhaps Nile would slit her throat, or Nicky would put a bullet through her head, or Joe would use his carefully honed scimitar. If given the task, she believes Booker would be poetic and use her own labrys to end it. A beautiful and fitting way to die. 

But, as it stands, she continues to live. 


	3. I'm Meaner than My Demons

One thing Nicky has not been in a very long time is angry. He’s been frustrated, irritated, pained, furious. But anger is something separate from it. It burns like low embers at the end of a fire, deep within his soul, smoldering despite any efforts to put it out. There was just too much that happened, too much that hurt, for him to be able to move on quite yet, especially given the way that the others are all still struggling, suffering. 

He tries to speak to Joe in the morning, careful to keep his voice soft and his movements slow. Nicky tells him he loves him. Reminds him where they are. Asks him how he’s feeling. If he’s lucky, he’ll get something of a greeting in response, but not much in all honesty. It’s usually silence. Or sobs. Or pleads. Either way, nothing that Nicky can cling to and say that Joe is still here, still alive, still himself. He may as well still be in Merrick for all the presence he has, a thought which Nicky is immediately guilty for. He doesn’t mean it. He doesn’t want Joe to still be there, in fact, wouldn’t wish Merrick on his worst enemies. Even Keane, whose name makes Nicky’s face hot and his blood cold. He can still feel the needle in his chest. Inside of him. 

“Have you eaten?” Andy asks him.

“Have you?”

Neither of them make food, nor do they share. Andy has her juice, which Nicky pretends not to see her add vodka to, and he wastes time staring out the window while they wait for the others. Nile is the only one who seems to be keeping it together, and she’ll have conversations or make food or something, and Nicky knows that Joe will need to be part of it, even if he doesn’t understand. These mornings are their one sense of unity. So he waits, patient and quiet, for Nile to come out and make toast for herself, and then a little longer for Joe, who’s buried in a hoodie with his eyes unfocused.

“Morning,” Nile says cheerily.

Joe flinches.

Andy sips her juice.

“Would you like to spar today, Nile?” 

“After my breakfast,” she answers.

She butters the brown bread with a slow scrape, douses it in cinnamon sugar, and then eats it as though she’s not the only one still attempting to look after herself. Nicky has starved to death before, unpleasant but not unbearable. Still he fuels himself in late night binges of the cabinet that no one bothers to question. Sometimes, if he’s lucky, he gets Joe to partake in an orange or a bag of chips.

Joe watches, and Nicky kisses him on the way to get his sword when Nile cues him to get ready to spar by wrapping her hands. Although she can’t get hurt- not permanently, anyways- she still follows rituals from a life that’s over. Even though they’ve long since stopped using bare fists. She trains on Joe’s scimitar because they all understand, on some level, that Joe is not going to come back from this any time soon. If he recovers, she’ll get her own sword. Perhaps she should train on Andy’s labrys, although Nicky understands how personal the weapon is, even to a woman who will be dead and gone too soon. He chooses not to process his grief for her.

Outside under the sun, he readies his stance and holds his sword out in front of him. It’s longer than that of Nile’s, although both their blades are wicked sharp, and she’s been a fast learner. She understands that he can reach her first, but that up close, his weapon becomes unwieldy and she has the advantage. The two weapons are a beautiful compliment, used on the same side, but one that Nicky is aware he may never experience the same way again. He misses Joe beside him or across from him, and the playful way they knew how to avoid each other. When he blocks Nile’s blow and follows it with an arc of his sword, it sinks into her side, and she doubles over with a cry. He pulls it free to follow her to the ground, wait for her to heal.

“Defense does not negate offense.”

“Yeah, I got that.”

She presses a hand against her side and takes several ragged breaths until she’s healed enough to sit up. Her healing is still slow, still new. But then she’s alright and back on her feet with her grip firm on Joe’s sword. Again. 

“You’re different,” she says as they go at it again, metal hitting metal. “You were kinder before.”

Joe had called him kind in the van before they were ripped apart.

“I was never kind, Nile.”

She doesn’t argue, but the discussion was enough for her to catch his arm. The blood runs down his bicep before the pain clears, and he focuses again. To fight is much better than to dwell on the last time he was fighting for his life. For Joe’s. For Andy’s and Nile’s too, and he still hasn’t decided if he cares much for Booker’s. It’s Booker’s fault that this happened to them. Every moment of pain and suffering is because of him, and Nicky feels no sympathy for the way he dies in their dreams. Should he stay dead, perhaps it would be mercy. That’s what he wanted, wasn’t it?

“You were,” she argues. “I had a nightmare about Quynh, and you-”

“It does not matter.”

He catches her leg this time, and she goes down. 

“This is not a game, or a passtime. We are angels of death, and we kill and be killed. There is no room for kindness.”

“You told me that you try to do the right thing.”

“And look where it got us!” He has the urge to finish her off, as he would an enemy in battle. In that moment, he is afraid of himself. “Do you not see what it’s done to us? To Joe? There is no reason to be kind! It does not matter.”

She shakes her head. “I know you don’t believe that.”

Nicky drops his sword beside Nile, stained in her blood, and steps back. He knows it to be true. There is no hope anymore. Any part of him that may have been kind died on the floor when the pieces of his brain spread among rubble from an explosion. It died a second death the first time Joe was so afraid of the world, afraid of  _ him _ , that he hyperventilated into unconsciousness. There is no reason to be kind when the world has refused to extend the same. It lost the right. 

“Nicky, c’mon-”

“I’ll let you take first shower.”


	4. I'm Bigger than these Bones

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is the reason I wrote the fic

He doesn’t know how many days it has been. Months, years. A part of him has never left the labs, and the labs have come back with him as contamination on his skin. He feels it. On him, in him, covering him. It lives in him. He lifts his clean hand and finds it bloody.

“Yusuf, please, just a little water.”

Nicky’s in front of him. His face changes. Bloody and clean, tired and energetic, groomed and messy. It’s hard to tell which version of him is real, or even if Nicky is here at all, because someone keeps telling him that he’s hallucinating, a voice he can’t identify that might have even been himself. There’s water though, and he’s thirsty, but there’s no way to know if the water is actually safe. The needles weren’t safe. IVs. Things that go into his body are designed to hurt him and he knocks the cup away to shatter and spill on the floor, like dozens of others before it. Someone cleans up the glass, and it isn’t him, but he knows it’s gone. Gone. He looks for Nicky and it takes too long to find his face with blood dripping from the corner of his mouth.

He reaches for him, to wipe the blood away. Nicky takes his hand. Presses it against his chest where a heart beats strong. There’s needles sticking through his hand, into Nicky’s chest, penetrating them both and holding them together, but at least there’s life there, and when he looks up, Nicky has a soft smile for him. 

“We’re okay. You and me, we survived it. It’s all over.”

For him, perhaps. But it’s still alive and well and inside of him, needles and hands pushing at his ribs to try and get out. Things are in him and he thinks of prying his bones apart to let it out, but the moment he tries to let go of Nicky, there’s something worse inside of him that claws to life. 

“Breathe for me, Cuore. You’re alive, I’m alive. All of us are.”

He blinks and he’s lying in bed, alone. He looks around for Nicky and he’s gone. There’s this one bed in here, narrow enough that it would not hold his lover too, and he wonders how long he’s been gone. Time goes missing more often than it stays alive. He looks at the room around him to find something, locates a pair of shoes that are too small for his or Nicky’s feet. Little. Sneakers, shoelaces untied, blood on the side of one. Is it real? He slips off bed and unsteadily finds his way to it, playing with the frayed laces. They’re old. Clean. Dirty.

When he brings them out of his room, the others are there, talking. Nicky’s sword is bloody. His heart stops. Something happened and he was gone, and he couldn’t protect them. He drops the shoes and there’s hands on him, his face. He pulls away but then it’s Nicky again with his gentle touch and his rough hands. 

“Are you with us, Joe?” He smooths a thumb across his face, smearing blood. “Nile was cooking for you. Your favorite. We hoped you would eat.”

Behind him is the crisp white of a lab, then a brown table, then Nicky’s body on the floor as well as in front of him. There’s no understanding of it all. One day, he thinks, he had been sharp, but it’s long since been empty. His head is just a container for his loose blood, and if he looks to the side, he feels it move around and splash against the inside of his skull. They took samples of it too. All of it. His brain sits in a jar somewhere in that lab, and if he can find it, everything will be okay. 

“No, my love.”

He’s sitting. Nile is here. Her hair is not braided, but loose around her face, curly and pretty. It’s coiled tighter than his, and beautiful in its difference where it settles around her body. She coughs up a bullet onto the table, one that rolls across the wood, but when it reaches him, it’s a bowl of soup. Red. It smells familiar and the monster in his chest screams. The bowl of blood has rice in it. It’s Nicky’s blood. He turns his face away and Nicky is there, touching his face again. 

“Please, it’s been days.”

Nile says something he doesn’t understand, but she’s smiling at him. She reaches for him across the table, speaks again. There are a lot of voices here, hers and Steven Merrick’s the only he can genuinely pick out, even if the words sound less like words and more like a scrambled mess. The second he turns to Nicky for help, he’s alone and bloody. Cold. 

“Just a couple bites, Cuore. Anything. Whatever you want.” He finds Nicky’s hands, but not his face. “Anything in the world, any time in the world. Just a little, please.”

“We had breakfast an hour ago,” he says.

“No, that was Monday.”

“Today is?”

“Saturday, Yusuf.”

Warm water, hands in his hair. He tries to get away before he sees Nicky, his Nicolo, and he relaxes. He’s safe with him. Whatever happens, Nicky is here, and he’s smiling, even with blood in his teeth, and he’s gentle washing away the gore of something wet and red. Carefully, he breathes, and pushes all the needles out of his chest. The samples they took come with, leaving his body so nothing contaminated remains. Nicky cleans him like in the Jordan, with the same touch, drawing daggers from his body. 

There’s so much blood that it seems to never get clean, and when Nicky touches his chest, it sinks in deep to pull his heart away. He watches it beat in Nicky’s palm. There’s so much blood. His heart goes in a sample container. Nicky smiles with blood in his teeth. 

“My dearest heart, do you know where you are?”

The sun is warm on his face, and his family is here. Not Booker. Booker is dead on the floor of the lab, but the others are here and they’re watching him. Something important is happening but he doesn’t understand what, how, why. He looks for Nicky again. Beside him. Holding him. Half his face is gone but he’s still Nicky, cheekbone bright white in the open air but the same shape that has been traced a million times.

“I think this would be good for you, for all of us.”

“It’s going to get better, Joe.”

Andy coughs up blood until there’s enough for them all to drown in, and the next thing he knows, his spine is on the floor. 


	5. I Can't Help this Awful Energy

Nile is coping. Somewhat. She’s doing her best to hold them all together, but she knows deep down that this is more than she’s capable of. Even herself is falling apart, and she can tell that she’s slowly losing herself to all the pain and anguish too. The thing about healing is that she cannot permanently suffer from anything. The sparring in the yard is momentary, and it awakens something in her while she takes her time alone in the spacious safehouse. 

She’s done things without realizing. Her psychologist in the third grade had a name for it Nile doesn’t remember, as well as a thick file on her that went to the school but she never really learned about. She moves, she finds ways that keep her calm when the world gets too big and her skin too small. Most of it has been manageable, able to be masked. She can hide it, although she’s mostly stopped doing so since Merrick. None of this family would judge her. But this new one, she doesn’t think they’d understand.

She’s rocked back and forth, she’s bitten the insides of her cheeks, she’s played with her clothes and stripped off textures that make her wish she was dead. But this one, it’s new. It’s new because it can’t hurt her, and she doesn’t even think about it as she does it. The knife in her hand is a comfort and kind. It keeps her safe, and by the time she realizes she’s been slicing her arm to pieces, most scratches have healed, leaving only the blood soaking through her mattress. She could have just killed herself, she thinks. And she didn’t even realize she was doing it. 

So, like any rational immortal who accidentally just slit her wrists, she cleans her blade on her jeans and takes a shower to rinse the blood. The others wouldn’t get it, she doesn’t think, but she doesn’t risk telling them to find out. 

It becomes a habit, this cutting of her wrist, until a month and a half into their poor attempt at survival, she stares down at her blood, and in a moment of pain, she digs the knife in until her blood soaks her body. Until she can rip out her own vein and stare at it until it knits back together. She lives, of course, and she decides in that moment that they’re all in pain in a way they haven’t been able to manage alone. She doesn’t know if they can manage it.

Every night she dreams of Booker’s starvations. She wakes up and watches Andy have a panic attack every time she comes close to something sharp, something hot, something harmful. In morning sparring sessions with Nicky, he’s missing the softness that made her feel safe with everyone for the first time. Each day is filled with the absence of Joe and how broken he’s been by the whole endeavor. And today, she tried to kill herself after three straight weeks of blood. It’s not acceptable, it’s not normal, it’s not right. They can’t carry on like this, any of them, and she’s going to do something about it if it kills her. 

“We’re all gonna have a family meeting outside,” Nile says. She’s poured four shots, knowing they’ll need it, to carry with her into the little grassy area they spar in. Besides the fighting between her and Nicky, none of them get any fresh air. “There’s something we need to talk about.”

Andy raises an eyebrow and glances at Joe, who’s mindlessly sketching. When Nile glances at the book, she finds it to be a rather gruesome depiction of Nicky’s dead body, something she chooses not to address at the moment. There’s nothing she can say that would mean anything. That’s precisely the point. Nicky looks at the sketchbook too, with a rapt attention more intense than she’s seen from him in weeks. 

“I’m not asking.”

It’s Nicky who stands up first, murmuring to Joe in Italian and removing the paper from his grip. He leads them both outside, and Andy follows them on unsteady, half-drunk feet. Mortality has made her alcoholism visible. As they go, Nile behind with the drinks, she recognizes that what she’s asking of them is something they have never considered. It’s risky. But she’s spoken with Copley and set him on the scent, and she knows that it’s possible. 

“A big family meeting,” Andy says sarcastically. She downs her shot before Nicky even gets his. “What’s it about?”

“None of us are coping.”

Nicky takes his shot, and takes Joe’s into his hand. He offers it to him, but Joe doesn’t respond at all, merely keeps staring at his hands. That’s not unusual. So, as things often go with the two of them now, Nicky downs the shot for him, and Nile finishes with hers before joining them on the ground. This is for the best. 

“I think you all need therapy.”

Andy blinks. 

“I do too. I’m not- what happened to us, at Merrick. And everything else that happened too, in all of our lives, it’s traumatic. All of us are really fucked up right now, and I’m willing to bet none of you have spoken to a professional about anything you’ve been through. I’m going to find someone safe, I’m already looking.”

They’re silent for a while, before finally, Nicky turns to Joe. “My dearest heart, do you know where you are?”

Joe stares at him like he’s grown another head, but doesn’t say anything.

“I think this would be good for you,” Nile says. “For all of us.”

Then Andy comes closer, tries to cup his face and get his attention, but he doesn’t seem to register. “It’s going to get better, Joe.” She looks over her shoulder back at Nile. “We need to do this, for him, at least.”

“I would not ask him to do it alone,” Nicky adds. 

Nile pulls down her sleeves even though she doesn’t scar anymore. “And no more- no more suffering alone. When we’re hurting, we talk to each other.”

“You’re done cutting yourself, then?”

She does a double take, meeting Joe’s eyes. They’re clear. “What?”

“I saw you. You died in your bed.” 

Then he turns his face to hide against Nicky’s chest, seeking physical comfort for the first time in a long time, going off on an unintelligible tangent that has Nicky whispering comforts and Andy returning to Nile’s side.

It’s going to be alright.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> future parts of this series will likely be nile and/or joe centric because I said so

**Author's Note:**

> tumblr @transnicolo


End file.
